A wet forest does not burn. Try building a campfire with moist and/or wet wood. Not going happen. There are 4 things that are needed for a forest fire, such as the Dragon Bravo fire, but fuel is not one of them, because fuel is just the forest ecosystem that is just there. The four things are hot temperatures (preferably for an extended period of time), low humidity (exacerbated by the lengthy, hot dry temps and that which draws moisture from the ground/plants/trees, making them more likely to combust), strong winds, and, last but not least, an ignition source. What happened at the Dragon Bravo fire was all four of those things coming together. Here’s an article that lays it all out very clearly.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/why-did-dragon-bravo-fire-explode-on-north-rim-it-started-with-sudden-shift-in-weather/ar-AA1IFKmp

No amount of logging would have prevented this fire. There is the outside chance that had the fire crews not treated it as a managed burn, they may have been able to stop it before it grew and became a conflagration. But that is second guessing their decision making and what the conditions were on the ground.

Please, find Elon and head to those other planets now, so we can retain and restore the little we have left on this planet.

I didn’t start out well. I confused timber stocks with timber harvests; didn’t differentiate between federal, state, and private forests; and (like this article) mangled the differences between million and billion, and billion and trillion. Zeroes can be hard when there are a lot of them.

So I tried again. I think I got it accurate on the second round. There are 1 trillion cubic feet of forests in the United States. There are 12 board feet in a cubic foot of timber. The feds own 30% of American forests, which would be 300 billion cubic feet or 3.6 trillion board feet. U.S. government timber sales have been 2.3 to 2.9 billion board feet a year during the ’20s … during the Biden administration, those sales rose by 28%.

At the high end of the range, that’s about 0.08% of the total federal forest timber cut each year. If that goes to 5 billion board feet, it would be about 0.14% of the total federal holding, which again is 30% of all the forests. According to the forest info I trust, trees grow 2% a year, which would suggest an extra 72 billion board feet, compared to current harvest of 2.9 billion, and the Trump administration’s target of 5 billion.

As I have noted, the total amount of timber doesn’t mean the total amount that’s harvestable. That would seem, from a surface view, to be where the rubber hits the road, or the chainsaw meets the tree. There is a whole lot more that I do NOT know than what I DO know. Now, “Writers On The Range,” do you and your writers exist to help us know more, or is the point of what you do just to cherry pick numbers in service of this or that agenda?

The latter is and always has been common, but as the “legacy media” both shrinks and becomes more of an agenda-pusher all the time, and the other side (various developer and political interests) does the same thing, it would be useful to have someone play it straight.

For instance: A search yields 2.9 billion board feet in the national forests. Obviously, a blunt number that doesn’t signify how much is harvestable. Still, 5 million is 0.17% of that number. You presented no information about what’s a sustainable rate of harvest, nor did you examine in any detail the differences between your preferred “Fix Our Forests Act” and what you wrongly called “Trump’s new law.”

Okay, it seems clear, reading between the lines, that you despise Trump and his administration. Fine, but this shouldn’t make you as unhinged and as undisciplined and as unreliable as he is. Maybe you aren’t interested in providing useful, comprehensive information to Westerners like me who are interested in knowing more? Maybe you are comfortable with preaching to the choir? Both sides do way too much of that, including you in this very flawed story.

Gee, here you have a reader who doesn’t just say, “What a great job!” Dang.

Or maybe you are comfortable with preaching to the choir. Both sides do way too much of that, including you in this very flawed story.